One aspect of self-service terminals that is often over-looked is the ability of the terminal to be managed remotely. Today there are several companies involved in electronic self-service device management. Specifically, these companies focus on personal computer management. However, they typically do not have the ability to interact with peripherals that are unique to the self-service industry.
Due to the lack of remote capabilities, self-service device companies typically have to dispatch a technician to resolve device failures.
Several companies have developed software products to help manage PC devices, but these products may not be adapted to interface-well or, perhaps, at all-with peripherals on a self-service device such as a cash dispenser, depository, card reader, etc.
Other conventional products also typically do not combine PC management with management of self-service devices.
While self-service devices and self-service device monitoring solutions are available, these device solutions provide little information to the technician going on site to resolve self-service device failures. Recently some progress has been made in this area with the introduction of component level monitoring provided through Simple Network Management Protocol (“SNMP”). This feature allows for sensor level reporting of a failure. It would be desirable to provide more diagnostic details to assist the technician in problem determination.
Furthermore, current devices and device monitoring systems are typically reaction-based. Generally, such systems initiate a fault analysis only when a self-service terminal generates a fault that indicates a hard down failure—i.e., a failure that interrupts device service. When a hard fault indication is received, the monitoring system dispatches a technician to repair the self-service terminal. Because travel time accounts for a large percentage of downtime for self-service terminals, it would be desirable to eliminate, when possible, downtime for self-service terminals attributable to travel time. Specifically, it would be desirable to provide a self-service device that, preferably together with a remote monitoring system, can predict imminent failure and dispatch a technician to repair the device prior to the device going out of service—thereby eliminating the downtime associated with technician travel time.
It would also be desirable, in general, to provide apparatus and methods for providing end-to-end self-service device management.